Some things hit close to home

Every once in a while a story becomes extremely difficult to report, not because sources can’t be found or because of a bad case of writer’s block, but because the subject matter is pretty hard to handle on a personal level. The story I wrote about Travis Scott for the July 29th edition of the Sunday Post was one of the toughest I’ve written in a while.

Mostly because it involved talking to a family that is moving on with their lives but still grieves over the loss of their son. Immediately after I made the first phone call, to Travis’s mother, Joni, I had to step away from my desk and my phone to clear my head. It was a pattern I repeated throughout the process, simply because the weight of the situation is pretty taxing, obviously for Travis’s friends and family, but for me as well.

Many tragic stories don’t make it past the initial reaction of grief, but there had been eight years between the accident and this story, and instead of a first impression, the stories I got from Travis’s family were the products of long reflection and a grieving process that lasted for years. And as a reporter, it’s very difficult to simply put that aside and write the story. My hope is that the story about Travis was as much about people as it was about helmets and skateboarding, and that the intense emotions I received in interviews are present as well.